Fire
by microlm
Summary: At a time when every other child worshipped their parents, an idol, or a deity of some religion, he worshipped fire. Oneshot, Kasai-centric


A/N: I started writing this, and I still didn't know what to entitle this. Darn. Well, I'll be titled by the time I'm done; I hope. Also, despite there being a 'Kasai' section, no one uses it. I would like a Setsuna section, hurhurhurhur.

Disclaimer: Yuusei Matsuei owns this manga, not me. I am hoping that he will start a new project soon so I can fangirl over that.

---Fire---

He supposed that there must've been a time he worshipped a being. Every human did at some point. All he did know was that by the time he could actually start remembering things, he had gone past that point already.

At a time when every other child worshipped their parents, an idol, or a deity of some religion, he worshipped fire.

His older sister was nothing like that. She had always idolized their parents as though they were invincible; followed their directions to the dot and tried to make him do so too. "Mother says this" or "father doesn't think that this is a good idea". There were always constant references to them even after they died.

Zenjirou didn't remember his parents very well. For the most part, they were just dim blurs occupying a tiny space in his memory. Their images were only focused clearly as they were in their death throes, and that didn't help. By then, their bodies had been charred black and faces melted beyond recognition. Even that image was only a quick flash before the dominant thing which occupied his memory took over: fire.

The details were fuzzy, but that didn't matter. What did matter was that an arsonist set his house on fire. He wasn't very old then, perhaps three or four, and his sister barely reaching the double digits. His parents were probably in the kitchen and he was probably seated on the kitchen floor playing with whatever toys he had.

Then a thunderous boom and the room exploded into a furious sea of red.

His memory was selective and he remembered no pain and no terror. There was only a boundless expanse of red and orange and yellow which drew him with its burning light and drowned everything in its smoldering blanket of smoke. The droplets of its glittering gold hurled themselves all around the room and illuminated the places the main source could not reach as its own smoke threatened to cover the room in black. He was enclosed in his own world, being lulled into a dreamy state by mellow rumbles and sharp crackles.

He remembered no screams and no cries. There were only two scorched bodies which invaded his world and fell in a heap at his feet. With that, the dreamy feeling disappeared. One of them (probably his father, or was it his mother?) slowly looked towards him. His first reaction was to draw back in disgust. Then, before he knew it, two humans had come and snatched him and his sister away.

Outside of the red world, he felt clammy and cold. The blaring sirens were a pain on his eardrums. As were the shrieks of his sister. He was surprised to find her crying.

It only escalated as the two bodies which had invaded his world were carried past them in stretchers. The air was filled her cries for mother and father. He, meanwhile, had sat calmly, wondering why those people in yellow were trying to make the fiery sea disappear.

His aunt and uncle arrived not too long afterwards and his sister ran into their waiting arms, weeping about _mother _and _father. _Zenjirou continued to stare at the flames, which, unlike his parents, continued to lull him even in its death throes.

The police brought over the arsonist. Again, the air was filled with shrieks although this time, his aunt and uncle were shrieking along with his sister. The arsonist looked very satisfied, Zenjirou noted. His face was a perfect picture of happiness.

With their newly acquired orphan and homeless status, the siblings moved in with their aunt and uncle. Life settled comfortably into normalcy.

He didn't like that.

Day in, day out; the years passed monotonously. They were so insignificant that he could hardly remember the events of the past week. He felt no desire to live.

Not that he wanted to jump off a building or hang himself. It was just that should a chance to die presented itself, he would've let things go as they liked. Even during the happiest of times, there was a vague discomfort. Something was missing.

Playing with other children brought him no joy, although hanging around with her friends was his sister's answer to every problem. There was nothing; no thrill, no excitement to any game played. At some point, he decided to stop wasting energy doing something he found no joy in and refused the offers of other children. In turn, they began to stop asking him. After awhile, he became the 'anti-social boy'.

'To be happy'. That was what he answered when his teacher asked what his goal in life was. A very practical goal, his teacher had said. It might not have sounded as fantastical as some of the other children's ('To become a superhero', 'To take over the world', 'To go to Pluto') but it was still ridiculously hard.

To find the answer to this annoying problem, before heading off into the big world of middle school, Zenjirou embarked on a 'spiritual odyssey within himself' (as he decided to call it). His sister called it him being melodramatic.

He had a hard time concentrating enough to even depart from the port and begin his journey. Fire danced in every corner of his mind, distracting him from everything. Eventually, he gave up trying to clear his mind of it, and embraced it. After all, the arsonist, he remembered, was a very happy man.

So one day, he decided to start a fire. Not a puny, pathetic flame turned a deceptively cold blue as he always saw when his aunt cooked, but a one which had some life in its warm hues. He made the fire small at first, just a single match stick burning a pile of wood found around the abandoned lot he was working in. That flame wasn't enough. More wood. More grasses. Soon, he was heaping anything burnable into the flames.

The fire happily accepted his offerings and ate everything up quickly, increasing in size all the while. Soon, its flares reached higher than Zenjirou could see with his eyes. He sat there, hugging his legs, staring into the depths of the fire, letting it slowly lull him with its flickering dance. It wasn't quite as expansive as the sea he had encountered before, but its effect was the same. He was at peace. Nice and warm, wrapped in his own world as the heady perfume of the smoke surrounded him.

Again, _someone_ had to intrude. A flash of ashy black. There was a yell in the distance; the smoke had attracted attention. He broke from his reverie and left. No point in being pestered with questions. However, he looked back one more time. For a moment, he thought he might've saw two bodies staring right at him.

He started more fires. Most of the time in abandoned lots and the like. His little escapades into that warm world he enjoyed so much attracted plenty of attention, although he made sure to never be caught.

Fire was the almighty force in his life and would continue to be so until his own was snuffed out. Why admire a human, he wondered, when they were just delicate things eaten as easily as wood by the flames and swayed so easily? Fire overpowered all. A human trying to protect another from fire would fail. They could do nothing in the face of it. Try standing in fire's way and it would quickly engulf the protector before moving on nonchalantly to the one protected. Even with the flimsy armor developed by humans, fire could only be withstood for a short amount of time. Humans and nature may try to put out or contain fire in order to keep itself from being razed, but fire always returns, for life needs it, no matter how grudgingly they may admit to that.

Fire was unprejudiced. Wood, grass, animal, building, human; it devoured all. Sometimes, fire would be a friend, as it often was to Zenjirou (his _best_ friend, he called it), but get too close, and still, friend or not, fire would burn.

Eventually, not even those bonfires he made were enough to quell the discomfort he felt. The fires had to get bigger. So, he turned towards buildings. Really, he thought, such huge heaps of material were just asking to be burned.

Zenjirou was no idiot. It would take skill and careful planning to succeed in coaxing fire to flare without being turned into a crisp himself. There was the problem of someone finding out that he started a fire too, but that was just a minor detail.

Once his plan was made, he chose a fairly small house and waited until the occupants left. Then, there was a familiar bang and the house burst into a sea of flames. A breath of hot wind rushed towards Zenjirou. He smiled; he could feel all his worries turning to ashes along with a 'Welcome Home' sign hanging on the front door. Naturally, his feet took him towards the sacrificial house. Going in would make him happy, yes it would…

Sirens blared. Zenjirou stopped and frowned. The firefighters had come quickly, meaning he had to leave. He shrugged; it just meant he would have to try again.

As countless houses fell, Zenjirou became more skilled. Many times, he could even buy himself enough time to enter the houses, although none of the trips had quite managed to take care of that discomfort. Before he knew it, he had learned every trick from A to Z.

Before he knew it, he was labeled as a wanted arsonist. Not by name, of course, no one had caught him yet. He had nearly dropped his dinner when he heard himself being referred to as 'the ruthless serial arsonist' with videos of the homes he had burned down. Ruthless? Him? Really? He didn't think he had done anything _that_ bad. If some idiot was eaten by the flames, it was their own fault for getting too close.

His sister (home from college) had shivered. "What a horrific person," she had said. Then she absently asked Zenjirou to scoop her another bowl of rice. He complied, just barely able to keep from snickering.

The years turned to irretrievable ashes and he changed. His aunt and uncle and sister saw him as a failure since he did not go to college and obtained a low paying menial labor job. _Where did he go wrong?_ That was their question. They supposed he had gone under gang influence sometime in high school since that was when he had begun being a chain-smoker and skipping classes regularly.

The truth was different. He had started smoking because he loved the scent of fire so much he couldn't be without it at all times. Cigarettes were the closest he could get to that scent with J-oker being the best of the best (In fact, he had gotten so pissed when the brand was discontinued that he had hijacked a truck, drove to the manufacturing company, filled the truck with cigarettes and burned the factory down before heading back to his cheap apartment to store the cigarettes in his cheap-but-working refrigerator). Whenever he skipped classes, he was either setting a fire or learning/thinking of new ways of setting fires.

He liked the feeling or superiority his control over fire gave him. Fire, the indomitable force, the thing of worship, under his command! Unlike all those other pathetic humans who could only wait to be devoured in the face of fire, _he_ could coax it into shapes and directions which kept him in the heart of it all, but safe nonetheless. It was a control which Nature could only envy. Why, the name Zenjirou Kasai just wasn't enough. Kasai-sama had a nice ring…

Not to mention the pathetic police. They could do nothing against him; they couldn't even identify him after all the years he had been in the business. A shame really that no one knew fully of the exploits of the great Kasai-sama.

Not even his family. His sister had married and had a son who was a toddler at the time. Despite the fact that he had dinner at their home at least twice a week, none of them had the slightest suspicion that he was the arsonist (he wished there was another word specifically for him, since he had fire starting down to an art) the police were having sleepless nights over. They let him handle the stove and play with their son as he pleased.

Most of the time, he just bounced Tetsu on his knee and the toddler would erupt into a burst of laughs. Sometimes, he would put something in front of Tetsu's eyes and try to make him interested enough to follow it with his eyes. He found that nothing enthralled Tetsu more than the little ember glowing at the end of his cigarettes. Whenever one was dangled before him (which was no very often since his sister did not approve of him smoking with Testu around), Tetsu would wave his chubby arms and try to grasp at the red glow.

"Whoa, careful there, Tetsu. You don't wanna get burned."

"M-mo, m-moe, moe!"

He took the toddler with him once under the pretense of accompanying Tetsu to see the fireflies. As yet another building was swallowed whole by the mass of fire under his biding, Tetsu clapped his hands and giggled, looking happily around him as thousands of those pretty gems he had seen on that stick in his uncle's mouth swirled around in the air. Zenjirou smiled too. He really liked this kid.

At this time, the discomfort was a stronger force than it had been before. Fire rid him of half of it, but something always remained, something that was keener than it had been before.

He was caught one day and the police finally knew the face of the great Kasai-sama. The media celebrated as the terrible arson was finally behind bars; his family was shocked and could've sworn that the arson was just a man with the same face and name as him.

Bars did nothing but heighten the discomfort he had buried under heaps of charred rubble all that time. Fire still pervaded in every space of his mind no matter how hard the prison officials tried to 'reform him'. He was sentenced for life, but Zenjirou planned otherwise.

He escaped using a handmade flamethrower of scraps no one thought dangerous. About ten guards were burned to death and another five were sent to the emergency room with third degree burns. Dozens were wounded in the riot that followed his jailbreak and in total, twenty prisoners used his escape as a stepping stone for their own that same night.

Once again, he was out in the world. Fear froze the public until his fires turned them to charcoal. Yet, as though the time it was allowed to reign unrepressed in the prison had given it strength, the discomfort refused to be reburied.

Finally, just as he had decided to give up playing games that bored him as a child, he decided to give up on life.

It was supposed to end in one big bang. He was supposed to die as he at last allowed himself to become a sacrificial animal to the fire he had once worshipped.

But he didn't.

The fire had nothing to do with it. It surrounded him in high waves and was very eager to dig in to its meal, friend or not. The fumes it gave off were heavier than Zenjirou had ever encountered and drifted him off to dreamland better than even those of his first encounter. How long, he wondered, had it been since he had allowed fire to ease him like this? Years, probably. Ah well, he was too tired to think. It slowly cut him off from the rest of the world as it prepared to take him away to a new land…

Then, as always, someone intruded. At first, all Zenjirou could see was a hazy, black outline, slowly approaching through a curtain of fire. The cigarette within his mouth nearly fell. All at once, the hazy face focused until he could make out two blank eyes staring at him from the remains of a charred face. And was it only one body? A second one seemed to loom right behind, ready to appear at any moment. The discomfort overwhelmed.

And a new discomfort seemed to be on the edge of coming…

The figure crept closer and the vision of the two bodies was swept away. It was clearly only one man. But what a bizarre one.

Fire tried to bite at him to no avail; the man simply brushed it aside. He wore no protection against the flames, but still walked about with a swagger of one who felt completely secure. He had no fear of going the way of Zenjirou's parents.

He stepped into Zenjirou's world and looked done upon him, a thin smile on his face. "What a waste of talent. You want to die? Then allow me to show you the joys of living." With that, the man placed his hand on Zenjirou's head.

A strange feeling entered him, familiar, yet new.

It made him want to run; but it also made him unable to move.

It made him want to cringe, vomit, look away; but at the same time he could only continue to stare.

It was so painful that he felt that he could die; but his heart pounded faster in defiance to the thought of death.

Fear.

Fire was gone from his mind. Swept away. In its place, that man cast his shadow.

And for the first time in his life, Zenjirou Kasai wanted to live.

* * *

He supposed there must've been a time when he feared nothing.

That was distant in the past now and must've been boring. Humans needed to have a will to live, since without it, life would seem bland; but without fear, there would be no need for a will to live.

Once felt, fear was not easily forgotten, especially not in the presence of Sicks.

That, apparently, was his name. Fitting, he thought, for a man who dealt with humanity as unfeelingly as a deadly bacterium with no cure.

There were others who felt the way he did; tens of thousands of them. They had their own little 'group' although the 'main' branch consisted of only five people Sicks dubbed the Five Fingers.

Seduced by Sicks' claims of their superiority over the rest of humanity, of them being a 'New Species' and of his promises of a better world where only they, the beings above humans, would rule and live; they followed him, worshipped him like a god. They were very proud of their name, the Five Fingers.

Five Fingers of his non-dominant hand, Kasai thought. Even if they were all cut off; Sicks would be able to go on, a little hindered, but nothing more than that.

Kasai had been skeptical from the first. All of them? New species? Impossible. A single new species such as the one Sicks claimed they were would take millions of sacrifices, billions. In the end, only one could be produced. Sicks wasn't quite human, he accepted that. But he and the other 'Five Fingers'? Personally, he thought they were just a bunch of idealistic geniuses who had violent tendencies and problem accepting being the way they were. Yes, geniuses, but very much human nonetheless.

None of the other four saw that. They threw away their 'human' selves readily and took on new identities. Kasai kept his. He shrugged it off. Let them believe what they wanted to, and he would believe what he wanted to. Of course, that didn't keep DR from constantly making snide comments about his messages or Genuine from chiding him about his loyalty.

He was proud of being human, even if it meant being lumped together with the hordes of idiots who shared his specie.

He would go against the 'New Specie' in his own way; nature compelled him to try and best another who was different. Kasai wasn't a fool. He wasn't about to kill Sicks. Instead, he would try to outlive him. Sicks was a New Specie, not a god; he would die at some point. There would be a satisfaction knowing that he, a human, had managed to beat a supposedly superior specie in life. So he rejected to being called anything but his name. He refused to acknowledge himself as anything but human.

Until his goal could be reached, he obediently followed the orders. Most of the time, it simply involved making the existence of Sicks known throughout the world. When he felt grandiose, Kasai would blow up a building, or when he was feeling a bit lazy, he would roll a burning baseball over oil. Either way, the orders never took long and Kasai could walk away from the fire, cigarette in mouth, minutes after he had begun.

Sometimes, however, orders took much longer to execute. Take capturing X for example. That took months of preparation. First there was tracking it down in the first place, then gaining access to it via becoming one of his lackeys, _then_ and only then could he even attempt to secure it. He failed the last part of the mission; Ai had had him kicked out.

Then there was another disappointed during that mission: Tetsu. Since it had been awhile since he had been in the area, Kasai decided that he should pay a visit to his favorite (and only) nephew. He had been so looking forward to it too. After all, Tetsu had become an arsonist like himself; or so he thought. When the saw the boy, all Tetsu could talk about was his regret and guilt—never about the joys of the act itself. Apparently, the electronic drug couldn't breed real criminals; instead, it even served to dissuade some in the end. Kasai left, cigarette in mouth, flame bursting behind him.

Humans. His specie was disappointing him more and more. No one seemed able to stand up against Sicks. All of them just resignedly sat waiting to be slaughtered.

Or so he thought. There was a demon, Neuro. One by one, Neuro and his lackeys picked off the Five Fingers until only he was left. Sicks was completely unperturbed. Kasai smiled to himself. Five fingers of the non-dominant hand…

Kasai supposed that he would be sent against the demon eventually. He never was.

Another mission. Another fire. That was what it was supposed to be; but, he got careless, and became cornered like a rat on the roof. Not by Neuro, which would've been some comfort, he supposed, over what had really happened; but by the _police_. The useless police force who didn't know how to do anything but throw around parking tickets like confetti caught _him_, the great Kasai.

That wouldn't do. At the very least, he decided, he would take them all down with him.

Fire erupted out of the cramped windows from below with a roar that would've shamed a bomb, carrying it with it shrapnel of glass and metal. There was a roar as the fire still within the building leapt towards the roof, excited tearing at the flimsy barrier of concrete keeping it from its prey. The concrete, too weak to withstand the fire any longer, crumbled and fire reached out its claws to snatch its sacrifice.

_Sacrifice._ There was only one.

The triumphant smile on Kasai's face was frozen despite the tendrils of heat that licked at him. He could see them, just for an instant. _They_ were still up there, shaken, but otherwise unharmed. He had expected to see them getting lower and lower, not higher and higher. Then, they were gone; fire shut its smoky jaws and Kasai felt himself jarring against its stomach along with several pieces of debris, many of which landed on top of him.

Impossible. He had planned for the police bastards to roast down here while he laughed from about the oven, or at the very least for the police bastards to roast down here while he laughed from inside the oven. Neither had occurred. There was only him in the pit of the fire's stomach.

How embarrassing. That nearly hurt more than the bruises and broken bones. Nearly.

_Ah well._

Slowly, he managed to take a cigarette from his pocket and placed it in his mouth.

_Guess I gotta drop out of this halfway._

It wasn't so bad. This fire was even better than one he had originally planned to die in. Kasai Zenjirou, the great Kasai, would die in the big he always wanted to. The thought comforted him somewhat and he leaned back, resigned.

The fumes were carrying him away, to that warm, hazy place. It really was just like the time before, only, he was sure that there'd be no Sicks this time around. The embers fluttered around like thousands of fireflies over a swamp filled with fire-weeds. The warmth was washing over him, soothing the pains. He smiled.

Then the discomfort began to nag.

In the distance, a black lump was slowly crawling nearer. The heat distorted the thing, but as it came closer, Kasai could make out the arms which dragged it forward. All at once, the warm blanket was becoming unbearably hot. He tried to ignore the thing and looked up at the ceiling instead. _Gimme a light, _he said, trying to block out the thing which was only becoming harder and harder to disregard. He laughed nervously.

It gripped his arm. Slowly, he turned his head to look at it. It had two bodies entangled and melded with each other in a charred mess. Its bony limbs jutted out in strange directions. The arm which gripped him seemed to be outside of its socket. Both of its two heads twisted themselves to look up at him, their ashy skin, already thinly stretched on the rather deformed bone, stretched even thinner as they smiled, showing the blackened remains of teeth.

_Zenjirou._ The fingers trailed up his arm.

No.

_Come with us. _

No.

_It's time to return home._

No.

_You may have left, but were always waiting there._

No.

_Why did you run?_

There was a crackle from above; the roof was collapsing. _Time to go_.

No, not now, not now.

Yet fire continued, mercilessly, happily digesting its sacrifice. It did not matter that this sacrifice was the one who had controlled it for years; it did not distinguish between friend and foe. No begging would work. Fire did not care if what it destroyed was useful to it; such things were trivial. Nothing could sway it.

He had forgotten that. Absolute evil? There were worst things in the world.

The stones, surrounded by flames, came raining from the sky. The thing embraced him with both its arms. _You'll be one of us soon._ The discomfort was changing.

Fear. Even greater than what he had felt with Sicks.

No.

He struggled to detach them, hampered by his several broken bones. Pieces of the roof thudded beside him. He knew that he really would die if the entire collapsed at once. At the most, he could get to his knees. Though his body protested, he moved forward, crawling at an aggravatingly slow pace. What an embarrassment; the great Kasai, reduced to crawling away like some insect. The thing clutched his ankle and Kasai winced as it put pressure on the broken bone.

_Where are you going?_

He pulled away and continued to move.

_Leaving us again?_

More and more debris were showering down upon him, each ember burning away what it could.

_You can't!_ The thing lunged forward to grab him once again.

A piece of steel, melted out of shape by the heat, fell and struck the thing. Kasai turned his head, but the thing was gone. Replacing it was a flare of fire, shooting out in all directions.

* * *

He supposed there was a time he feared a being. Feared it and aimed to outlive it. Ridiculous once he thought back on it.

Sicks had given him one scar to remember his power by; fire had given him many (and crippled him to boot).

Kasai was successful in outliving said being; the demon called Neuro had dispatched of Sicks. But it brought him only minimal satisfaction. What was the point of outliving another being? Beings all died at some point or another. Fire, however, was immortal. One could extinguish it, but it always returned, sometimes to advance life. As nonchalantly as it gave out life, it took it away. Perhaps that was what made it so fearsome; it was a true god, immortal and all powerful. Beings were rational and could be reasoned with; fire listened to no one. Kasai couldn't forget anymore.

He was satisfied with that.

The thing never appeared in the fires and Kasai never went in them. The lull was only to lure in foolish sacrifices after all. Fire was to be admired, closely of course, but he was no longer an idiot who wandered into every one thinking he was immune. Too close and the god-like thing burned.

He limped away in search of sacrifices to his deity.

* * *

A/N: I'm so sorry. That was probably kinda confusing. Whoops. Definitely not that great, especially since I had little drive to finish it, but somehow or another, it's done. Whoo.


End file.
